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jamax writes "According to the BBC: 'The Russian military has come up with an inventive way to deceive the enemy and save money at the same time: inflatable weapons. They look just like real ones: they are easy to transport and quick to deploy. You name it, the Russian army is blowing it up: from pretend tanks to entire radar stations.' But the interesting thing is these decoys are not dumb - actually they appear to be highly advanced for what I thought was a WWII-grade aerial photography countermeasures. Apparently they have heat signatures comparable with the military tech they represent, as well as the same radar signature."

It's a very valid strategy too. If there are 2 or 3 real targets, they may be easy to neutralize. What if those targets became 3000? You'll have an awful lot of your resources spread out to blow up non-targets. After a while, morale can stop dropping when the troops are sent out on yet another mission to blow up a balloon. And that can be dangerous. Thinking that they're "neutralizing" another balloon, and running into a real armed battalion would be a disaster.

The same applies to all kinds of other scenarios.

Decoys are useful for lots more than just defensive purposes. If intelligence says an area is occupied, and you're trying to pull a group out quietly, they may be diverted around such decoys, and right into a bigger trap.

But, if the decoys can be identified, that may not prove anything. 2000 decoy units and 3 real units, you could assume that the real units are protecting the places of value, right? Not necessarily. They only need to be close enough to react. So you have a real unit in front of Bunker A, and decoys in front of Bunkers B and C, you wouldn't necessarily want to attach Bunker A.

There was an article not long ago about the DoD was transporting something secret. They opted to use plain white trailers on regular tractor trailer rigs. They'd load one up, and send a dozen or so trucks out at the same time from what was already a busy location.

The problem with doing something like SAMs (or worse, the Minuteman's) would be that they would be a huge problem if there were an accident.

Your statement is generally true with an exception. I used to drive truck and got one of these loads (probably a decoy load). I wnet through a scale house and got poped for a random inspection and they wanted to open the cargo doors. I called the 800 number to declare the seal was being broken and before I got off the phone about 4 black SUVs entered the parking lot and stopped the inspection. Of course they claimed they were looking from something in another truck and required all the resorces of the DOT officers, but I suspected it was something different as the weight on the Bill of lading didn't seem to match the weight that was in the trailer.

As for the rules of war, Well they only apply once you are in an actual war. We wouldn't technically be in a war until invaded or congress declared war and the battlefield came to the homeland. Once war broke out in the area, then the rules of war would apply.

about 4 black SUVs entered the parking lot and stopped the inspection. Of course they claimed they were looking from something in another truck and required all the resorces of the DOT officers, but I suspected it was something different as the weight on the Bill of lading didn't seem to match the weight that was in the trailer.

I'm sure it was purely a coincidence. I see packs of SUV's with gov't suits in them all the time. Perfectly normal. Nothing to see here. Move along, citizens.:)

A few things to note about the class 7 Radio Active placards. If you are in a large city, often the law requires the truck to take a bypass route unless they are delivering inside the city, then you must take the most direct route to the destination. This is true for all Placarded Trucks and in most cases, even non-placarded Hazmat loads. (yes, there are some loads (or there were 10-15 years ago) that contain hazardous materials but not in a quantity to require being placarded but you had to otherwise follow the hazardous material routes.

The other thing is that certain types of X-ray films will require a 7.1 radioactive placard. I'm pretty sure they got rid of subclass placards for radioactive so it would just be a "7 radio active" placard now. I also had an old bomber sight from an some WWII bomber that was actually radioactive. I found it in a garage where I moved to and found out it was radioactive when attempting to see what it might be worth. I was able to FedEX it to a museum that handled it from there. Strangely, it was going to cost around $2500 to dispose of it, I couldn't legally sell it, and the museum took it for free but I had to pay an additional $10 to ship it to them.

Anyways, I figured I would mention that so you would know that simply staying off the outer belts of most large cities would be enough to avoid the class 7 placarded trucks and even if you get close to one, it's quite possible- actually more likely, that it is because of any number of relatively harmless materials in comparison. But yea, I agree, I wouldn't be following one either just because of what it might actually be.

How do you know it wasn't organised crime instead of spooks working on behalf of the military?On second thought it does sound like the stupid sort of James Bond games spooks would play when somebody mistakenly gives them a military task to do. I wonder how many they lost?

This was one of the reason that the Soviets and Americans signed the ABM Treaty. Both sides realized that the cost of building launchable decoy ballistic missiles or filling your MIRV with a combination of real and fake warheads was way cheaper than the cost of building anti-ballistic missiles.

Apparently the Serbians and Republika Serbska (Bosnia) used decoys a great deal when they were under air attack from NATO. From the Serbians I talk to (over TeamSpeak when playing LockOn Flaming Cliffs 2 - greatest combat flight sim out there, and the DCS series is awesome) it seems to be a matter of great pride that they duped NATO and much of their real equipment surived while the decoys got the complete hammering.

Inflate them with poison gas. Then, it really is a weapon. Without, isnt really just an inflatable replica and not a weapon?

And why would it need to be a weapon when its purpose is to make it hard for the enemy to know real information about your asset's numbers and positions?Put down the comic books and pick up the Art of War.

I don't know. It seems that in the US, the legal definition of a weapon is something intended to believed to be a weapon. That is, if you take a plastic toy gun to rob a bank, you get the same (or similar) weapons charges that you would have gotten had you just used the real thing.

Similarly, non-functioning replica weapons are not allowed on airplanes (per the TSA).

Tricking an enemy into diluting his forces to cover an imaginary threat can be more militarily useful than actually having all those tanks. If the enemy diverts an armored division a couple of hundred miles off course to face an inflatable 'threat', those tanks are out of the real battle just as surely as if they had been destroyed -- and Team Inflatable didn't have to risk any real hardware or soldiers to do it.

The Confederates did something like this in the early days of the US Civil War--they painted logs to look like cannons, and they often succeeded in fooling Union surveillance. Why "Quaker" guns? Because the Quakers were (and are) avowed pacifists (except for the one who was elected President of the US).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaker_Gun [wikipedia.org]

Inflatable and cardboard tanks were used along with fake radio broadcasts and intentional disinformation by double agents to help trick the Germans to believing that the Allies, led by Patton, were going to invade France via Calais(where the Channel is most narrow) instead of at Normandy. This actually caused the Germans to locate a significant number of men and tanks in the Calais region. I believe some units were actually pulled from Normandy to bolster the defenses at Calais.

IIRC, despite urging of Rommel, many of those units in Calais region were also being held back while the invasion was in progress. Too many top figures of the Reich set their minds on the invasion happening in Calais; and indeed thought for some time that Normandy is the decoy.

The Confederates did something like this in the early days of the US Civil War--they painted logs to look like cannons, and they often succeeded in fooling Union surveillance. Why "Quaker" guns? Because the Quakers were (and are) avowed pacifists (except for the one who was elected President of the US).

The first emperor of china had a whole damn army of realistic clay figures [wikipedia.org] (each with different facial features and painted to look alive). Put a couple units of real people alternating between atanding at attention and moving around in the mix, and any invader looking over the wall would shit his pants at the sight of the vast number of armed soldiers ready to fight.

Even less newsworthy - AFAIK Soviet-era decoys certainly did have false heat signatures (starting with a primitive stove of sorts, essentially); I don't know about faking radar, but trying to do that would be obvious.

Tanks, S-300s, and other large military equipment tend to leave tire and, well, track tracks. Especially when in large numbers, these tracks can easily be identified through daylight reconnaissance photos. If a whole company or division of tanks pops up out of nowhere, with no evidence of them being moved to that position, it's going to raise some big flags. Hawkeyes and other aerial radar systems can easily track ground vehicles. They will have no record of these formations being moved into position.

I see this more like something China, North Korea, or Iran would use to inflate(no pun intended for once) force estimations. Park them alongside a couple real tanks or launchers, and all of a sudden a tank company turns into a battalion.

Gosh, the Russian army better give up. Some slashdot geek has thought of the ultimate hole in their camouflage. Tracks! Who would have thought!

Except that they already knows this, and use weedwhackers and torches to create the various effects of a tank on the landscape. Very clever those military people. Almost like they know what they are doing.

That is why they also forbid the local kids from using them as bouncy castles. Would ruin the effect.

Look at the other part of my post. The radar signatures of the vehicles making the tracks won't be the same as the number of tanks they are trying to simulate. Aerial radar platforms keep records of what they track and can easily tell that the tracks have been fabricated.

You're right. It's totally inconceivable that the human operators of that equipment would slip up. An error in communication could never happen when reporting to superiors. Especially not when they've gotten very little sleep in combat conditions.

Humans are the weak link, and our weaknesses will be exploited by the enemy. People have made bigger mistakes than this

OK, you know that 10 planes on the airstrip are real, and 30 are fake. But the pilot who's trying to take them out will have flak, AAA, all sorts of things getting thrown at him. The decoys will be positioned to look like the more promising targets of opportunity. With the same infrared and radar signature, it's hard to pick out the ones you want.

Wait, so let me get this straight - you're positing a war wherein some aerial reconaissance platform has a mostly uninterrupted, continual radar view of all enemy troop movements? And it doesn't get the shit blown out of it why, exactly?

You're basically assuming that one side would have complete air superiority, which is simply not going to happen unless you're talking about something like the Iraq "war", wherein one super power goes in and completely thrashes a country with technology that's several genera

This is not new.
Back when I was in ROTC (the 1980's), I recall an article where photorecon people found out that they were duped.
They assumed that a set of nuclear subs were berthed for a long period of time for repairs.
A storm came through and bent one of the "submarines".
So the presumption was that the Soviets knew when our sats went overhead and between the times they set sail on one sub and inflated another in its place.
So the Soviets had a sub patroling somewhere unknown because we thought it was in for repairs.

Chances are that an inflatable tank or radar station is only going to get hit by an air strike or artillery fire.

Filling them with explosive gasses will only cost more and make the impact of the attack more devastating to the earth that the inflatable sits on. Although, if there are any personnel nearby the inflatable, they might become even more dead.

In World War II there was an entire army of inflatable weapons in England right across from Calais, France. Its purpose was to convince the Germans that the invasion would come at that point. It really came at Normandy.

During the invasion they even dropped chaff over the Channel near the fake army to make the Germans think the invasion was happening there. Both sides had radar, but the secret was that the Allies had microwave radar and not just VHF radar. The chaff looked like an invasion fleet to the radar.

As part of the ruse, they had General Patton running around inspecting the "troops" and getting them ready for the invasion.

The chaff looked like "they're using that chaff to block our radar again", which means there's something they want to hide. It doesn't look like a fleet, it looks like an attempt at covering up a fleet.

Every military vehicle has two potential price tags associated with it:Mind bendingly expensive overpriced showpieces with no real value (during peace time or when it's doing mundane things.)A once in a lifetime bargain (when it makes the difference between winning or losing a battle, or even bigger : turns the tide to win the war.)

If a decoy takes a bullet and a real tank survives, that real tank still has the potential of falling into the second category. If the production cost on the decoys is 1% the c

I like the story from WWII before D-Day. The Allies had wooden and canvas tanks setup to confuse the German reconnaissance flights. The Germans showed that they'd seen through it by dropping a bomb in the center of the formation. There was no explosion. Curious soldiers investigated and saw that it was made out of wood, too!

I'm not sure why the BBC is calling this "new", or where the "upgrades" are.The closest thing I could come up with is something to add a heat signature so they appear more realistic on thermal imagery--but again, that's not new at all. Way back in WWII, the Russians would just take an inflatable tank and just stick a little coal stove in it to give off heat.:\

"if they cost 1% of the price of the real thing, they are in the same price range as the weapons aimed at them, plus they still need soldiers and support."They are much less expensive than an (accurate) enemy airstrike. A sortie that hits a tanker, perhaps two or three times, delivers ordnance on the dummy target, then returns to base eats up fuel, resources and MANY man-hours that could be used elsewhere.

Russia could conceivably be threatened by China, but pretty everyone else in the region is not a threat. Everything else is small skirmishes, usually with Russia as the agressor. So when in reality would these be rolled out?

The reason why everyone else in the region is not a threat is because the Russian military can easily outmatch them. This is just another brick in that wall.

For the same reason, US Army fields some rather advanced weaponry designed to deal with latest-gen MBTs, for example - even though the chances of an American soldier meeting such a thing on any of today's battlefields in practice are nil. Also why US upgraded to F-22 and F-35, despite the fact that the venerable planes of one or even two generations bac

Actually if you read the source, these decoys are meant primarily for military exercises - so that your troops can be trained to seek and destroy targets that look as real as possible both in natural light and in infrared and on the radar.

You can do all kinds of things with that, for example - make 10 rocket launchers and heat up only a few of them when the attackers approach: the attacking pilots must observe the heat signature of the targets and deduce which targets are battle ready and which have already

Given the nature of modern surveillance techniques, I would have thought a thicket of missile launchers "popping up" in a new location, without any movement provenance would raise suspicions, even given US military ham-handedness.

That only works if you have continuous (and fool-proof) observation. Which is not the case for either aerial or satellite surveillance. Even the Taleban has learned how to (sometimes) move undetected by knowing when satellites are overhead.

Given the nature of modern surveillance techniques, I would have thought a thicket of missile launchers "popping up" in a new location, without any movement provenance would raise suspicions, even given US military ham-handedness [bbc.co.uk].

Sure, but if you know that there are 1,000 new missile-y looking things of which 10% are real missiles you have to worry about all of them, for certain purposes.

Probably because they export them to other nations that buy Russian military hardware. Harder to sell things when nobody knows about them.

Plus, for their purpose, having everyone know you have very realistic decoys is actually a good thing. Making people assume the real hardware you're looking at is probably just another fake is just as good as having them think the fake you're looking at is real.